This semester ended up being a test of how well I could learn Korean while having other college classes to worry about, including my Chinese class. In high school when I learned a lot of Korean vocabulary, I had less work and I still learned the most words during breaks from school. So it was hard to put aside time to focus on Korean and learn more on my own. I found it easiest to quickly review the vocabulary I know and to learn a quick lesson or two and then try to incorporate them into my lessons. Because my goal was to add a practical lens to my existing knowledge of Korean, I was really glad I was able to have conversations with Alvin. It was a casual way for me to build my speaking and sentence-forming skills. If I did not know how to say something--for example, if I knew the necessary vocabulary but did not know how to use it to form a cohesive sentence--I could ask him, and we would build the sentence for me to use and then continue the conversation. This way I got to learn not only how to connect verbs and begin forming more complex sentences, but also learned some basic phrases that I had overlooked when learning Korean on my own. Phrases that have to do with numbers, time, and duration of an event have always been hard for me, so we worked on those a lot and now I am a lot better at using those concepts in sentences and recognizing when someone is talking about them. I plan on continuing learning Korean, but I will try harder to learn sentences on my own and then have a concept prepared for my lessons instead of trying to maintain a free-flowing lesson.
I did not find a lot of the readings useful. Having taken a basic psychology class in high school, I already learned stuff like parts of the brain that have to do with learning and processing language. I feel that for a college class, we should be able to learn these concepts a bit more deeply instead of just learning about the existence of areas such as Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area. This does not mean that I want to have hours of reading, but I do feel that our readings could have gone deeper in describing these concepts to reflect college-level learning. I found the reading about bilinguals interesting, and I liked that you chose articles that gave two different viewpoints. I also liked discussing the article in class about the roots of language, and would like to learn more about it, although not necessarily for this class.
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